COMP 107 The Trojan War (W) Last offered Spring 2014Cross Listed as CLAS101

The Trojan War may or may not have taken place near the end of the Bronze Age (c1100), but it certainly provided poets, visual artists, historians, philosophers, and many others in archaic and classical Greece (750-320) with a rich discourse for engaging questions about gender, exchange, desire, loss, and remembrance, and about friendship, marriage, family, army, city-state and religious cult. This discourse of "The Trojan War" attained a remarkable coherence yet also thrived on substantial variations and changes over the 300-400 years of Greek literature we will explore, a dynamic of change and continuity that has persisted through the more than two millenia of subsequent Greek, Roman, Western, and non-Western participation in this discourse.
More than half of the course will be devoted to the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey; we will also read brief selections from lyric poetry (e.g. Archilochus, Sappho of Lesbos), some selections from the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and several tragedies (e.g. Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Ajax, Euripides' Trojan Women). We may briefly consider a few short selections from other ancient Greek and Roman authors and/or one or two modern poets. We will also watch several films, e.g. Troy, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?Gods and Monsters, Fight Club, In the Bedroom,, Grand Illusion.

Class Format: lecture and discussion

Requirements/Evaluation: evaluation will be based on a series of short papers involving close textual analysis, two 5-page papers, and contributions to class discussion

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Prerequisites: none

Enrollment Preference: majors in Classics and Comparative Literature, with attention also given to assuring a balance of class years and majors